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Friday, February 10, 2012

One of my followers jokingly asked me the other day if I would like to write some essays for her. That question brought back my sad essay writing history.

As I wrote before I went to a one teacher high school. We had one room with grades ten , eleven and twelve. The teacher taught all subjects to all three grades. If it was math period he taught a lesson to each grade and gave assignments. When I think back these teachers had to be awesome. These teachers were not highly qualified. They were just dedicated and hard workers. The two teachers I had did not have degrees. They were both majoring in math so their strong area of teaching was in math. They worked hard in the other subject areas but they could not do as well as the math. As a result my best marks were in math. When it came to English I barely scraped by. I do not remember writing an essay of any kind. We did the odd descriptive paragraph.

When I entered university the challenge was monstrous and the learning curve steep. We were assigned essays of opinion and many other papers that required first class writing skills. Needless to say my first attempts at essay writing were pathetic ...so pathetic that I failed first year English. Because I'm an eternal optimist I repeated first year English and had an instructor who gave me assistance to improve my writing skills. I also realized that I had to put more effort into the class and also visited the prof to get help with my papers.

So when someone asked me if I would like to write some essays, it triggered the memory of a very stressful experience.

So in high school I did well and math so I majored in math when I went to university. After I had been teaching awhile, I asked the Principal if he would give me an English class. When I got my timetable I had three English and one math so I was somewhat alarmed. I talked to the English dept head and he was quite pleased that I had been given the assignment and encouraged me to take the assignment instead of going to the principal and asking for a change. From that time on I taught English. I also became the English dept. head for about seven years!! I have to say that teaching English was my most satisfying teaching assignment.

So if I'd have had a high school teacher who was an English expert I would have had my best marks in English and wouldn't have had a challenge with essay writing.

And to my follower who wanted me to write essays for her...the answer is still no.